My Lost Home
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My Lost Home
Images: Veer Munshi & Deepak Ganju Song: Arti Tiku Kaul Video: Deepak Ganju  |
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Points of Recall, Thresholds of Farewell Ranjit Hoskote |
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| Veer Munshi has addressed a range of subjects in the course of an artistic career that spans 17 years and has been conducted in several cities, including Baroda, Srinagar, Bombay and New Delhi. But exile remains his most fundamental condition and preoccupation. Munshi has essayed variations on the self-portrait; he has explored the possibility of revitalising the genre of portraiture by means of playful, irreverent allusiveness. He has studied the effects of schismatic ideologies and the politics of violence across the planet, and reflected on the wages these exact on the trust and affection that bind individuals and communities together. Savouring the experience of travel, he has released himself towards the cultures, image-making practices and political situations of diverse geographical locations. |
| And yet, overtly or through camouflage beneath other concerns, Munshi returns to the key crises of displacement, disorientation, and the loss of shared assumptions of belonging. While he may have perfected the art of masking melancholia with wry humour and softened the edge of self-inquiry with self-irony, the artist remains unremittingly aware that his present is an uncertain transition between a lost homeland and a future mined with shocks and bleak epiphanies. The interplay between the muted tonality of anguish and its opposite, the mandate of attempted detachment, is strongest in the photographs of Kashmir that Munshi has taken over several winters. The hand of snow is heavy on buildings, people, time, and the hope of movement. Our eyes settle on bridges that have almost vanished beneath snow and fog; on roofs that shoulder their burden of whiteness, and also of knowledge; on piles of snow that threaten to reduce steps, arches and walls into mere marginalia before the grander, unforgiving script of the natural cycles. The magic of the word ‘sheen’ comes back to haunt the mind: it is the Kashmiri for snow, neither image nor word to be experienced in the plains or the peninsular reaches of India. |
 Balcony of Ancestors |
| Munshi has lived and worked in New Delhi since the early 1990s. His decision to shift there from Srinagar, the city where he was born in 1955, coincided with the diaspora of his community, the Kashmiri Pandits, from the Valley of Kashmir. The Pandit diaspora forms an important but neglected strand in the tapestry of Kashmir’s tragedy: a story compounded from violence and counter-violence, militant terror and State terror, obscurantism, low-intensity warfare, and the maintenance of a constant and debilitating state of emergency. Through the two decades that are described cautiously by people in Kashmir as ‘the time of troubles’ or ‘the period of disturbances’, individuals, families, neighbourhoods and the relationships among the Muslim and the Pandit communities have been devastated almost beyond hope of healing. |
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| Life has been a nightmare for Kashmiris who live in the Valley; it has been no less harrowing for those who had to leave in fear for their lives. The Pandits fled almost en masse – though a number of them stayed on, either out of courage and conviction, or because they were too poor to shift – after prominent members of the community were murdered by separatists, and an atmosphere of terror was created in which the only option seemed to be an exodus to Jammu or northern India. Where, of course, further misfortune awaited them: twenty years later, hundreds of Pandit families live in wretched conditions in the refugee camps into which they were herded by State agencies (Simha: 2008). |
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| In these circumstances, Munshi poses himself certain crucial questions: How does the artist speak for his ethnic group and its suffering, without losing sight of the larger historical contexts within which its story must be told? How can he speak as an artist, an agent of the imagination, without lapsing into the role of spokesperson? How can he reconstruct, in and from memory, a culture, a style of life that has been irretrievably lost? How best can he present these as proposals concerning the anguished present, and not as nostalgic or apocalyptic evocations of a lapsed paradise or destroyed utopia? The task is doubly complicated: not only must the artist resist the corrosions of propaganda and amnesia, but he must also restrain himself from inflating his own suffering, great as it is, into an occasion for cosmic rage. |
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| In his most recent and ambitious work, presented for the first time in this exhibition, Munshi addresses this complex predicament through the painting-based environment and the unvarnished documentary photograph. Accordingly, the exhibition, titled ‘Shrapnel’, comprises two new bodies of work: ‘The Chamber’ and ‘Pandit Houses’. These works, which break new conceptual and formal ground, enact a major shift in his trajectory. They were achieved as the result of a long process of intensive dialogue between Munshi and myself, interacting as artist and curator, but also as Kashmiris representing waves of diaspora several centuries apart. Both of us were alert to the pressure exerted by our shared origins, as well as to the strictures of a critical history. In ‘Shrapnel’, Munshi has adopted the chosen forms of the elegist: the memorial and the archive. These forms allow him to shift the focus from the image to the conditions that make the image possible, or even inevitable. |
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| The Chamber’ is an environment that has evolved organically from his ongoing series of paintings concerning the transmogrification of everyday life in a period dominated by civil strife, terror attacks and endemic violence. In these paintings, his protagonists are agents, pawns or voices of catastrophe: men dodging land mines and negotiating the wreckage of war machinery, protestors agitating in the cause of separatist resistance, animals both symbolic of and trapped in a system of paranoid securitisation (Hoskote: 2006). ‘The Chamber’ is a response to a curatorial proposal that I made to Munshi in 2008, suggesting that he develop a wraparound experience in which his paintings would grow into panels and finally into walls, surrounding and drawing the viewer into a simulation of the zone of conflict: as unwilling participant, reluctant fellow traveller, or shattered pilgrim. |
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| The suite of 25 photographs that bears the deceptively spare title of ‘Pandit Houses’, is a documentary photographic narrative of the homes that the Pandit refugees left behind. The series began almost accidentally, on a chance impulse, as research notes that Munshi made during a visit to Srinagar in 2005. |
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| His periodic visits to Kashmir are strange acts of half-return: he asks himself whether he is an émigré, a returning native, or a visitor from another planet. The present suite of photographs expresses his attempt to deal with the profoundly mixed feelings attendant upon these visits to a city that used to be home, a landscape that used to be homeland. It is an accounting for what is lost and cannot be redeemed; for Munshi knows how completely Kashmir has changed around these houses that are slowly falling into disrepair, ruin or partial reuse. A generation of Kashmiri Muslims has grown up without ever knowing what a Pandit looks like, or what it means to live in a multi-religious society. |
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| Each image is stark, plain-spoken, without embellishment, and indeed silent and quite simply itself. There is no annotative manipulation of these images, no theatricality, no vein of melodrama, no overtly elegiac air, no demand for sympathy. There they stand, in our line of sight: ruins, monuments, memorials. This is testimony to the unforgiving march of history, which takes no prisoners. |
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| Occasionally, the photographs encode personal references: memories of the street one lived in, one’s own house; the homes of relatives and friends; the neighbourhood now inscribed over with the names and occupations of others. We stand hypnotised by these empty husks of houses, bodies from which the souls have been evicted. Are these points of recall, or thresholds of farewell? |
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References
Ranjit Hoskote, ‘Dodging the Land Mines of History’ (note in the exhibition catalogue of ‘Encounter: A Solo Show by Veer Munshi’; New Delhi: Art Alive & India Habitat Centre, August 2006). Vijay Simha, ‘In exile at home’ (with photographs by Uzma Mohsin; Tehelka; New Delhi: 29 November 2008, pp. 10-19). |
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